


Source

by birderlands



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (but the ending is egregiously hopeful), (except these two) (probably), Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Gore, Everyone is Dead, Giant Spiders, Horror, M/M, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23390986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birderlands/pseuds/birderlands
Summary: The world is over, everyone else is gone, Jon takes Elias' statement but does NOT take any of his crap.Starring: blatant lonelyeyes apologism, slightly-softer-than-canon-but-still-feral Elias, and Jon's very convenient Knowing powers.[Kinda weird and experimental]
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 9
Kudos: 68





	Source

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by ["They all rang incredibly false"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23553736) by [qb_cereal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qb_cereal/pseuds/qb_cereal). 



In the end – the _very_ end – the Web prevails. She devours the other fear gods one-by-one. First, she destroys Terminus, so she cannot end. Then she subsumes the rest; slowly, methodically weaving the fallen deities into simple puppets.

The last two avatars of the Eye watch helplessly as their master is torn eyelash from bleeding eyelash and rendered utterly blind. Jonathan Sims turns to…to the man that calls himself Elias Bouchard and says, bitterly:

“Well, your eyeball god is dead. Tell me, is this how you envisaged the revolution? Is this the fate you wanted when you had me open the door?”

It’s a taunt. A jeer. The cleaver-edge of compulsion is little more than an insult, and that is how Jon intends it.

And Elias throws his head back against the cobwebs and laughs, stuffy and unhinged all at once. The impossibility of his demeanour – smug even in the face of defeat – mingles with nostalgia and makes Jon nauseous.

“Yes,” Elias declares, finally, _proudly_. “It _is_ what I wanted. You see, the Eye betrayed me a long time ago, Jon.”

The words echo around the empty cave walls. The Web feeds and gnaws in the ensuing silence. Jon hadn’t thought there was anything left in this world that could surprise him, and yet.

“Wait, this is _on purpose_?”

“Payback is delicious, Jon. You should try it sometime—”

“—the world has _ended_ —”

“—and it need not have done so, if the Eye had simply acquiesced, and released me from its service forty years ago when I asked.”

In that moment, Jon misses Melanie and her knife more than ever before. Almost more than he misses _Martin_. How dare this terrible man lament being _trapped in an unwanted job_. How dare he even speak those words with his wretched throat.

And then it passes, and Jon’s anger is once more swallowed by anguish. The craving for violence is replaced by the desire to journey back to the mouth of the cave, to find the thing that Martin became, with its many grasping legs and venomous maw, and to stay by it and care for it until it killed him. Whatever monsters they might have become, Jon’s love for Martin is as eternal and inevitable as the Web’s victory.

Melanie is gone, and so Jon leans toward Elias and brandishes the only weapon he has left.

“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me _why_.”

The power of the Archivist hums under his words like a buzzsaw. For so long, Jon viewed his abilities as a curse lain by a megalomaniac, but now he counts them as a gift, inherited from Gertrude and her predecessors, addressed to him with a note saying only ‘ _do better_ ’.

Elias brushes away his effort, like an errant fly.

“And if I don’t? Your tricks don’t work on me, Jon, and you certainly cannot annihilate me with your mind, like you did with that Peter Lukas.”

Elias looks properly enraged, and his glittering eyes start darting around the room, from bare wall to sparse, smooth rock.

“Are you looking for a weapon?” Jon asks. The ability to laugh was burned out of him a while ago, but he manages a dry, rattling approximation. “Going to brutally murder me with a pipe?”

“Or perhaps I’m looking for a way out.”

There is no way out, they both know it. Strands of silk hold them tighter than any heavy, choking soil.

“Martin would find a way out,” Jon says, largely because saying Martin’s name is the only thing that still feels good. “He’d have an exit. Or at least a plan.”

“That is why he was taken,” Elias replies. “He belongs to the Web now. And if she’s thorough – and she’s always thorough – he won’t remember you. He won’t even be able to conceive of you. A well-organised god doesn’t let their avatars fall in love. It’s too…messy.”

Jon draws back his lips in a smile, and tries not to taste salt as the wetness from his cheeks dribbles into his mouth.

“Very sensible. Look at what happened to us.”

For a beat, neither of them speak. Jon swings his body back and forth idly. And then his brow furrows as he recalls the shape of the words he’d spoken. He’d meant to say ‘look at what happened to _me_ ’. But the last syllable had morphed into something else.

“Elias?” he says, hesitantly.

“Conversation’s over, Jon,” Elias says, too gruffly.

“Did I just Know something about you?”

“Change the subject, Jon.”

Jon gathers his remaining wits and thinks hard.

“Elias, why did you try to leave the Eye forty years ago?”

“There’s still time for me to murder you, Jon.”

“And just a moment ago, you said I’d vaporised ‘that Peter Lukas’. Using ‘that’ as a determiner, as if there were more than one Peter Lukas.”

Elias doesn’t respond, but he glares at Jon with a feral and speculative loathing, like a trapped mouse deciding whether to chew off its leg. The balance of power between them has shifted. Jon hates it. He hates all of this. He hates that they’re the only two survivors of the apocalypse. He hates that he even has to waste _thought_ on his horrible boss, let alone converse with him.

But, since they’re here.

“What name shall I use?”

“What?”

“For your statement. What name shall I use for you?”

Maybe it’s the direness of their situation. Maybe it’s the way the Mother of Puppets bites into the vitreous part of the eyeball, spraying eldritch sludge across the ground. Maybe it’s the pins-and-needles bite of compulsion.

“Elias Bouchard is as good as any.”

Jon nods, as businesslike as he can manage.

“Right. Statement of Elias Bouchard regarding… regarding Peter Lukas?”

“Yes.”

“Recorded direct from subject, during the event of the Web’s predomination and the end of everything. Statement begins.”

“Doesn’t even tingle,” Elias says haughtily. “You’re losing your touch, Jon. I suppose it’s because our patron is in the midst of being devoured alive, but still, that’s no excuse for sloppiness. Very well. I need you to understand that I wasn’t just a _good_ avatar – I was the best. For decades I served the Eye willingly and masterfully, and oh Jon, it held me in such esteem. Even the Lightless Flame did not prize its messiah the way the Eye cherished me. We were disciple and god, inseparable, and I gladly made whatever sacrifices it needed.”

“Yes,” Jon murmurs. “You’re a monster.”

“This is _my_ statement, Jon,” Elias snarls. “Now, as you probably already know, there are two kinds of information in this world, and the Ceaseless Watcher desires both.” Elias pauses to force his battered fingers into a shambling peace sign, to illustrate his point. “Information that can be unlocked with diligence alone, and information which is secured behind, well, a paywall. From day one, I partnered with the Lukas family to fund my research. And for the most part, it was fine. They lived and died in a string of privileged successors, and the fact that I could never remember which one was controlling the family’s funds at any given time seemed to delight them. They always smelled a bit like mould, but the offensive odour was a small price to pay, and I never had to talk to any of them for very long.”

“And Peter?”

“ _My_ statement, Jon! I first met Peter when he was twenty-eight years old. His family was _so_ proud of him, always boasting about _their finest heir_ whenever they deigned to speak at all. The Lukases had all their hopes and dreams pinned on this sad-eyed little man on his pathetic little boat, and I _took_ him from them. In a way, I couldn’t help myself. There’s always been a little of the Desolation in me, I suppose.”

Jon rubs at his temple.

“Are you trying to make this another story about one of your sexual conquests? Because I read _plenty_ of those back at the archives, and I am not interested in hearing another. Besides, I know how this one ends. You marry Peter, you divorce him a year later, then you marry him again, for whatever unholy reason. Wedding gifts? Attention? One of you lost a bet to the other? Anyway, the point is that you get divorced again, as soon as the ink dries, because underneath it all you hate each other. I _know_ this story, Elias. And I know that you do not love Peter Lukas. When I killed him, you—”

“You killed _a_ Peter, Jon. Not the original. You killed a copy.”

“A copy?”

Elias huffs, and then continues.

“Fear gods don’t like it when their avatars fall in love. I took him away from the Lonely and he took me away from the Eye. Love lets you anchor out of the Lonely, and in my stupidity, I thought that maybe some version of _notarised_ love might let me leave the Watcher.”

“So you married him?”

“ _My statement_ , Jon!”

“The best thing to come out of this apocalypse is that I’ve stopped caring what _you_ think of me,” Jon says, ignoring Elias’ angry gesticulating. “So when did you start hating each other? People like you don’t love for very long.”

Elias takes a deep breath. God knows how much oxygen they have left in this place. And then suddenly, a fistful of documents are airdropped into the space behind Jon’s eyes. Three in total, all official certificates from roughly forty years ago, arranged in ascending date: marriage then marriage then divorce.

“Warn me before you do that,” Jon scolds, and then. “How did you marry the same person twice in a row? Is that because you changed hosts?”

“No. I never divorced the original. I thought you’d like to hear that, Jon. It’s the kind of sappy, tragic thing that would tug at your ample heartstrings.”

“What?”

“The Eye did _not_ want to let me go. It saw original Peter as a rival for my loyalties, so in the end, it did what any loving god would do. It eliminated him, and made…facsimiles for me. To try and keep me cooperative. How is that working out for you?” Elias calls this last line to the glistening remains of his god, and smirks. “I thought so.”

“Wait,” Jon says, brain scrambling for some semblance of logic. “The man I killed. The one who convinced Martin to join the Lonely. He was a fake? Was he human at all?”

“I don’t know,” Elias says flippantly. “I don’t care. The Eye cannot create falsehoods, of course, but it willingly collaborates when needed. Take your pick: the Stranger, the Web, even the Lonely has its own way of creating empty puppet-people when it needs them.”

“You sided with the Web, even knowing it might have had a hand in the, uh, the Peter situation?”

“Yes, well, I got what I wanted in the end,” Elias says with a grin. “The Spider is known to play both sides against the middle. Much like, for example, an Archivist who asks you for a statement and then _keeps interrupting_.”

“Right. Of course.”

“The first time I met a fake Peter, the transition was seamless,” Elias continues. “The real Peter had a habit of carrying me around the halls over his shoulder. I can’t say exactly when he was replaced, but I know the real one carried me into my office, and the first fake carried me out.”

Jon makes a face.

“Your husband got substituted in the middle of…of being _raunchy_ , and you didn’t notice?”

“Don’t be crass, Jon.”

“Okay,” Jon says, despairing at being labelled as the vulgar one in this situation. “When _did_ you notice?”

“My patron tried to hide what it had done, of course,” Elias says. “But like I said, I’m the best. I was practically a part of the Eye, and that was only cemented when my resignation was declined. So, from that moment on I knew that my husband _might_ be a fake. After that, it was simply a matter of being sure. In the early days my investigation was hampered by the fact that I _wanted_ him to be real. But eventually, I always figured it out. And then I’d divorce him. And once it became apparent that I wouldn’t take him back, he’d be replaced by another, different fake.”

Jon opens his mouth, then closes it again. Then he opens it again.

“And every replacement would void your certainty,” he says. “As soon as a new Peter manifests, you would stop knowing that he was ‘definitely fake’ and only know that he ‘might be fake’. With each counterfeit Peter you’d have to figure out whether he was real again from scratch.”

“That’s correct,” Elias says, sounding surprised. “I admit it was rather fun, watching you vaporise one. That particular Peter had been bothering me for a while. I was looking forward to getting a new one.”

“Did you still hold out hope that you’d get the original back, one day?”

Elias makes a long-suffering noise.

“Yes, Jon, obviously. That’s why I _kept marrying them_.”

“And _how_ did you identify the fakes? What gave you certainty?”

Elias twirls a finger in the air.

“With the first one, there was a mole on his foot that shouldn’t have been there. The second Peter had a single eyebrow hair that—what do _you_ think, Jon? Use your brain! Empty shells don’t feel love. None of the fake Peters cared whether I lived or died.”

“I see.”

“It was simply a matter of deducing whether they valued my life. The Peters got better at pretending to care, and I got better at outsmarting them. It was a game, in a way.”

Jon shakes a strand of hair out of his face. The Web picks up the empty husk of the Eye, turns it over in her pincers, and starts attaching hooks and pulleys.

“And the real Peter? The original?”

“Almost assuredly dead. Or worse.”

Jon nods resolutely.

“Of course. You’re right, he’s either dead, or going to die. He might be the beloved golden child, but even the Lukas family is no match for the Mother of Puppets.”

Or at least, that’s what he means to say. It’s what he goes to say, but at the last minute his mouth changes course, and what he says is: “even the Lukas family is no match for the Martin”.

The air is deadly still. The Spider shrieks with glee, like a single note drawn from a battered violin, too long and too slow and too haunting.

“Elias,” Jon says, and he sounds like the old days, like a small child begging for the approval of a father-figure. “Elias, the thing in the mouth of the cave. The thing that Martin became. It tried to kill me.”

“Everything tries to kill you, Jon,” Elias says tiredly. He rubs his cheek on his still-crisp white shirt, leaving a dark smudge in its wake. “Including me, including right now.”

“It didn’t value my life,” Jon says, a revelation. “Elias, I. I think… I think maybe… I don’t think that was the original Martin.”

“My condolences,” Elias says, with all the warmth and empathy of a frozen rock.

“Did you not hear what I said before?” Jon asks deliberately, trancelike. “Right now, Martin is trying to kill Peter. The originals, I mean. I…I Know it.”

The words hit their mark like a sledgehammer, and Elias goes absolutely silent. No gentle swaying, no inertia, just hanging on the spot like the corpse he should have been years ago.

And then Elias opens all of his eyes.

“Jon,” he says tightly, sounding more horrorterror than human. “Jon, where are they? Jon, _Jon_ , do you _Know where they are_?”

Jon throws his head back against the cobwebs and laughs.

\--

end

**Author's Note:**

> if you read this whole fic then:  
> 1\. thank you  
> 2\. i'm so sorry


End file.
